Knight and Rose Show #41: Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon

Welcome to episode 41 of the Knight and Rose podcast! In this episode, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Seth Dillon, CEO of the Babylon Bee. If you like this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would appreciate it if you left us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast description:

Christian apologists Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss apologetics, policy, culture, relationships, and more. Each episode equips you with evidence you can use to boldly engage anyone, anywhere. We train our listeners to become Christian secret agents. Action and adventure guaranteed. 30-45 minutes per episode. New episode every week.

Episode 41:

Episode  Summary:

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Seth Dillon, CEO of the famous website “The Babylon Bee”. We discuss the effectiveness of mockery and sarcasm for opposing censorship by the secular left. We discuss what role apologetics played in building Seth’s Christian worldview. We also discuss how Christians can build a view of the world that takes the Bible seriously in every area.

Speaker biographies

Wintery Knight is a black legal immigrant. He is a senior software engineer by day, and an amateur Christian apologist by night. He has been blogging at winteryknight.com since January of 2009, covering news, policy and Christian worldview issues.

Desert Rose did her undergraduate degree in public policy, and then worked for a conservative Washington lobbyist organization. She also has a graduate degree from a prestigious evangelical seminary. She is active in Christian apologetics as a speaker, author, and teacher.

Seth Dillon is the CEO of The Babylon Bee. Dillon’s experience with censorship and de-platforming has placed him on the front lines of the battle for free speech in the public square. He now speaks on college campuses and at conferences across the country about the effectiveness of humor, the moral imperative of mockery, and the dangers of censorship. Dillon occasionally signs off Twitter to enjoy time with his wife and two sons in Juno Beach, Florida.

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Music attribution:

Strength Of The Titans by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5744-strength-of-the-titans
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Is Christianity Today a Christian publication?

I like to follow the work of Megan Basham on Twitter and Daily Wire, because she takes the Bible seriously on moral and spiritual issues. So I was very interested to read her latest article evaluating Christianity Today. On the surface, Christianity Today presents itself as a Christian publication. But are their beliefs really consistent with what the Bible teaches? Let’s see.

Here’s the article from Daily Wire:

The media has long framed Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham in 1956, as America’s most influential Christian news outlet. The Washington Post, for instance, regularly describes it as evangelicalism’s “flagship” magazine,” as does The New York Times. A review of federal election records, however, indicates that the views of the magazine’s leadership and staff may be far out of step with ordinary evangelicals.

Between 2015 and 2022, nine Christianity Today employees made 73 political donations. All of them went to Democrats. This tally includes President and CEO Timothy Dalrymple, who gave $300 in two separate payments to failed Georgia Senate candidate Sarah Riggs Amico.

Amico’s platform, which includes protecting abortion “without exception” and repealing the Hyde Amendment to allow federal tax dollars to fund abortions, contrasts sharply with the views of evangelicals who overwhelmingly say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. She is also at odds with traditional Christian beliefs when it comes to gender, sexuality, and religious liberty.

Along with declaring herself a “staunch LGBTQ ally,” Amico promised to support the Equality Act, a bill that The Heritage Foundation warns would threaten parental rights over children who believe they’re transgender. The conservative think tank has also said the bill would decimate conscience rights for medical workers and “cancel[s] religious freedom.” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler put the Equality Act in even starker terms, saying it “represents the greatest threat to religious liberty in the United States in our lifetimes” and would “totally transform the United States as we know it.”

Dalrymple was not the only member of the magazine’s executive ranks to donate to Democrats. Natalie Lederhouse, Vice President of Advertising and Partnerships, contributed $50 to the 2020 Biden Victory Fund. The Federal Election Commission has no records of any Christianity Today executive giving to the GOP since 1991.

You might remember the Equality Act discussed in previous posts on this blog. Basically, the legislation would have made it impossible for Christians to advocate for Biblical positions on sexual issues. Not only individual Christians, but Christian businesses and charities. They would all have had to comply with the secular left’s views on sexual issues.

Megan also found this about a former NEWS EDITOR at Christianity Today:

Between October 2019 and November 2020, news editor Daniel Silliman made eight donations to five different pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ candidates, among them, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. In addition to possessing a perfect voting score from Planned Parenthood and NARAL, Warren supported shutting down crisis pregnancy centers across the country, and her platform included requiring schools to admit biological men into women’s sports and single-sex spaces. She also pledged to allow a gender dysphoric nine-year-old to approve anyone she appointed as education secretary.

Silliman also donated to Renee Hoyos, Tennessee Democrats’ nominee to the U.S. House; Moe Davis, House candidate from North Carolina; Blair Walsingham, House candidate from Tennessee; and former Senator Doug Jones (D-AL).

As news editor, he would have been in charge of all of Christianity Today’s coverage of political stories.

More:

In another article in the run-up to the 2020 election, Silliman spotlighted President Biden’s Catholicism and quoted progressive theologian Richard Mouw opining that “[Biden] is viewed as having an authentic faith… when he talks about his faith, it rings true.” Silliman then tied Mouw to conservative Christian icons, Chuck Colson and J.I. Packer.

[…][Silliman] also covered the Fairness for All Act, a proposal that would have granted special privileges to people who identify as LGBTQ. It was opposed by conservative legal groups like Alliance Defending Freedom for “undermin[ing] human dignity by threatening the fundamental freedoms of speech, religion, and conscience.” Approximately three-quarters of Silliman’s report on the bill was devoted to those who favored the legislation.

You might remember that Mouw is one of these “evangelicals for Biden”. Now that we know the truth about Biden’s business dealings and connections to foreign governments, it’s easier to understand what sort of morality Mouw supports.

The new editor-in-chief of Christianity Today is Russell Moore, who seems more focused on promoting the Democrat party platform than with defending policies consistent with the Bible.

The root cause of the problem with these “evangelicals for Biden” is that they have never adopted Christianity on the basis of studying the evidence, and forming their own views. Progressive Christians form their views socially not intellectually. When they are young, they put on the cloak of Christianity as a way of seeming virtuous to their parents and those around them. They didn’t choose Christianity because it was the best description of reality. They were born into it. It’s not a worldview to them, it’s an act.

Progressive Christians don’t make a case for core Christian beliefs using evidence to non-Christians. They simply don’t know how to do it, because they didn’t do it in order to “become” a Christian in the first place. They don’t have any work to show, because they never did the work. And their policy views are the same. They don’t form their views based on reason and evidence. They don’t read scholars like Thomas Sowell, or John Lott, or Ryan Anderson, or Scott Atlas, or Robert George. They just believe whatever will make people like them – just like they did when they were children.

Democrat contributions to Hamas-backer Iran isn’t $6 billion, it’s a lot more

I’m monitoring the news about the Hamas attack on Israel. I’ve gotten two questions so far. First, how could Israeli intelligence (Mossad), which is supposed to be the best, not know about this attack in advance. Second, Why didn’t the Iron Dome missile defense work to stop the missiles. I’ll answer those below, and see the latest about the Biden administration funding terrorism.

First, the national security / foreign policy people I follow on Twitter and listen to on podcasts are saying that national security and the military in Israel have gone hard woke in recent years, and they have stopped being able to defend Israel from real threats. Similar to how our own federal agencies are now largely engaged in attacking enemies of the Democrat party, while ignoring actual security threats like military-aged foreigners from enemy nations coming over the southern border in droves.

Second, the Iron Dome missile defense system only has a certain number of interceptors available. I think the number is 200 interceptors. (10 launchers x 20 missiles per launcher). Even with careful targeting, they were not able to shoot down all of the 2200 incoming missiles from Hamas.

One more point. Israel is a left-wing country, and has some of the toughest gun laws of any nation. Most law-abiding people are not properly armed to deter the threat of criminals or terrorists. So, the attack did a lot worse than it would have in say, Texas or Tennessee or Florida. Israeli voters thought they could “stop crime” and “stop terrorism” by banning law-abiding people from owning scary, noisy, smelly guns. It didn’t work. Feelings-based policy didn’t work in Israel, and it doesn’t work in America, either.

But where did Hamas, a terrorist group, get all of the money for 2200 missiles? How could a group of rapists and child-murderers plan such an attack? Well, they have said that they had help from Iran. The same Iran that Obama helped with pallets of cash when he was president. And Biden is helping Iran with cash, too.

The Federalist explains:

Many of the articles surrounding the atrocities of the Hamas attacks this past weekend have referenced the recent $6 billion “deal,” in which the U.S. gave this money to Iran in exchange for five Americans. It already seemed like the worst trade in history.

But it’s more nefarious than simply unleashing $6 billion to Iran, a known terrorist state and the most existential threat to the free world. In reality, this one detail hyperlinked quickly in most articles is part of a larger spider web of hidden details.

In a recent article, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former National Security Council official Richard Goldberg traces the money trail. He confirms: It is so much worse than we think.

[…]The revelations do not end there. U.S. officials have also quietly acknowledged that they’ve uncapped Iranian oil exports to China. These export levels, previously held around 775,000 barrels per day under Trump’s sanctions, are now estimated to be between 1.4 and 2.2 million barrels per day. Modest estimates value this relief at $25 billion annually.

Not only that, but the Obama administration and the Biden administration want Iran to have nuclear weapon capabilities:

We know Iran has already ejected international nuclear inspectors and are on their way to building a facility that is believed to be so deep underground that it would be impenetrable to any air strikes. Iran did not even have to stop their production of high-enriched uranium. They’re merely producing it at a slower rate. But the Biden administration chose to pick up the Obama era’s decision to unrestrain Iran based on a pinky promise.

Most recently, we learned that top officials were influencing the U.S. government in favor of Iranian nuclear power. A series of recently leaked emails have focused on Ariane Tabatabai, the chief of staff to the secretary of defense for special operations. Messages show her involvement with the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), a direct Iranian government initiative to allegedly “improve the country’s image abroad.”

[…]We’ve also come to learn of other aides who were directly corresponding with the Iranian government from their U.S. government posts, such as Ali Vaez and Dina Esfandiary.

Democrat party policy is not just about putting Israel in harm’s way, it’s also making sure that the American military can’t do anything to save Israel once they are attacked:

We’re stopping oil production in America while allowing Iran to export more, all under the facade of “green energy.” The administration has given the green light to increase oil production in the country that is the greatest existential threat to the free world. Meanwhile, Biden has choked American oil production with the fewest number of offshore oil and gas leases “in history.” This is after Biden canceled all remaining leases in Alaska. But since these leases are for 2024 to 2029, he’s pushed off Americans truly feeling this at the pump until, quite conveniently, after the election.

Squeezing the American wallet is far from the most dire consequence of this policy. Biden has drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) to multi-decade lows. Despite claims that they would be replenishing the reserves, the administration has not only yet to refill the reserves, they even pulled an offer at the end of this summer because of “market conditions.” Namely, oil is already too expensive, and we are drained of our most important backup resource.

Eventually, American voters are going to realize how electing Democrats creates problems here at home:

At this point, America has not simply left the world stage — it is funding terror.

The extent of this hidden money trail has yet to be fully realized. It isn’t only Gaza. It’s Lebanon. It’s Syria. It’s Iraq. It’s Afghanistan. It will be Paris and London. It is likely pouring over the U.S. southern border.

And it’s coming to a neighborhood near you.

Why do so many self-described Jewish people vote for the Democrat party, when the Democrat party clearly hates them? Well, when I listen to real Jews, like Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, they seem to think that many self-described Jews are just secular leftists, who disagree with what the Bible teaches.